I can’t find any current piece of journalism to use as a springboard for asking whether the novel will die. But considering that the question gets asked every 14 seconds somewhere on the blogosphere, I’m not going to worry. Just follow the trail of rent garments and gnashed teeth and you’ll find someone blathering about it. The question’s on my mind this morning, so that’s good enough for me.
Will the novel die? I won’t keep you in suspense: Yes, the novel will die. It might not happen in your lifetime. But yes, I can say unequivocally that the novel will eventually breathe its last and lay down contentedly in the grave of dead art forms. I’ll be very conservative and estimate 50 years.
And you know what? It’s not that big a deal.
Ever since the advent of television, people have predicted the demise of the novel, and other people have smugly sat back and declared that since it hasn’t happened yet, it won’t happen at all. But I think a lot of these defenders of the novel have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a novel is, not to mention a fundamental misconception of its importance.
First off, we have to consider the question of what it means to be a dead medium. A dead medium is simply one which does not produce a significant number of new works of art. When a medium of expression dies, that doesn’t mean that the jackbooted Art Police storm into your house in the middle of the night to burn every instance of it they can find. Life ain’t Fahrenheit 451. If the last novel rolls off the printing press tomorrow at 9 a.m., we’ll still have hundreds of millions of novels lying around to enjoy until they crumble into dust. And unlike, say, the 8-track tape or the HD-DVD, there’s no specialized equipment necessary for reading novels.
Nor do the Art Police threaten anyone with imprisonment who dares to create art in a dead medium. Vinyl is a dead medium for music, and yet there are still people producing vinyl records. Polka is a dead art form, and yet you can still find people not named Weird Al Yankovic creating polka. Given the importance of the novel to Western civilization, I’m sure that printers will continue pumping the things out in special limited editions long after the masses have stopped buying them in mass quantities.
You might think that I’m mixing up the terms medium and form here. The medium of the novel is that 8″ x 12″ hunk of pulped wood, while the form of the novel is the 120,000 words of prose that gets inked onto the surface. But the point I’m trying to make here (as Frank Lloyd Wright and Marshall McLuhan made long before me) is that those two things are inextricably tied together. The medium of the novel is its form.
We haven’t always had novels. No, in fact, while recorded human history has been going on for five thousand years now (depending on how you define it), the novel has been around for less than five hundred (depending on how you define it). Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle never read a single novel in their lives; I don’t think Shakespeare could have read more than a handful of them.
The fact of the matter is that the novel itself is an art form that evolved to take advantage of a certain new technology, namely the printing press. Why do books tend to be no larger than around 8″ x 12″? Because that’s about as large as you can make a book and still be able to hold it comfortably in your hands and transport it from place to place. Why does the print tend to be around a point size of 12? Because that’s about as small as you can make text and still have it be readable at arm’s length. Take those limitations and you’ll find that you can’t easily pack more than 200,000 words into a single novel.
So the novel is, in fact, a device that’s both created by and limited by certain factors of human physiology. These same limitations govern any art form. Ever wonder why most films are less than 180 minutes in length? There are certain issues surrounding the economics of movie theater chains and the technical specs of film projectors, but the real reason is even simpler. 180 minutes is about the amount of time that human beings can comfortably sit and pay attention to a film without having to either eat or hit the bathroom. Tack in an intermission or two and you can extend that timeframe for a while. But until we’ve got gastrointestinal and neurological programming that allows us to drastically extend the amount of time between bathroom breaks and naps, you’re never going to see, say, a 26-hour movie.
If you don’t believe that the printing process hinders creativity, consider this: most novelists don’t even write in print anymore. The vast majority of us compose our words electronically on computer screens. What you’re reading when you pick up a novel is a transposition of our art; you’re reading some publisher’s translation of our words onto an 8″ x 12″ hunk of pulped wood with a glossy piece of laminated artwork wrapped around it. Not only do novelists have little to do with the production of that hunk of pulped wood, but we’re often actively discouraged and prevented from having a say in it. We hand in Microsoft Word files. We don’t pick the cover artists, we don’t do the typesetting, we don’t design the little artsy doodads that drape over the chapter numbers.
The point I’m making is that there’s nothing magical about the size, shape, and length of a novel. There’s no divine law which states that the perfect size of a story is between 80,000 and 150,000 words. That just happens to be the number of words that will comfortably fit in your hands using standard twentieth century printing technology. It happens to be what the twentieth century publishing, distribution, and retail business was set up to deal with.
But now? With electronic media, you can fit an infinite number of words in your hands. You can hold Robert Jordan’s entire Wheel of Time series in your sweaty mitts if it’s digitized on a laptop or an Amazon Kindle.
It’s true that reading in digitized format is still kind of an unwieldy affair. You don’t find people reading novels on the subway with their laptops because it’s a pain. You have to boot the things up, you have to plug them in every few hours, and God help you if you spill a can of Dr. Pepper on them. I have yet to see an Amazon Kindle in the flesh (so to speak), but my impression is that Jeff Bezos hasn’t quite cracked the code on this one either. And, honestly, I don’t think he — or anyone else — will crack the code. Sorry, folks: I’ve been saying for years that there just isn’t enough money in novel publishing to support a dedicated e-book reader. The economics just isn’t there. (I won’t waste time going into the reasons for this, since Charlie Stross has done a fine job of it already.)
No, the novel will move onto the laptop computer — or whatever the laptop computer becomes in the next 20 to 30 years. Think about it: the MacBook Air fits in a manila folder. The MacBook 2020 will fit in a manila folder, and might just be foldable and solar powered too. Laptop screen text has finally gotten to the point where it’s easily readable just in the past few years, with the advent of LCD screens and font smoothing technologies like ClearType. In another fifteen years, onscreen text will be more readable than print text — plus you’ll be able to read it in any kind of lighting, resize it at will, and project it onto large surfaces.
Very soon we’re going to have a medium for distributing the written word that’s not only easier but better suited to the task than books. So let’s dispense with the silly, sentimental arguments you often hear about why storytelling is never going to go electronic. “You can’t replace the feeling of a holding a book,” “I don’t like reading on a screen,” and “I can’t read an e-book in the bathtub” are some of the sillier excuses you hear all the time for why printed books are going to survive until the end of time. I’m sorry, but “I can hold my entire library in my hand,” “I can download new books at will,” “I can search my entire library in a nanosecond,” “I can instantly send books to my friends,” “I can translate and define words on the fly,” and “I don’t have to devote an entire room of my house to holding my books” are going to trump reading in the bathtub any day of the week.
(Besides which… do you really think your laptop computer is going to be subject to being shorted out by a splash of water for very long? Dude, I’m willing to bet that your grandkids — if not your kids — if not you — will have no problem accessing their computers underwater.)
To sum up: the written word is going electronic. Permanently. Soon. Once that happens, storytellers will have no need to shoehorn their stories into these 8″ x 12″ hunks of pulped wood and ink. And once we’re not restricted to the medium of the novel, we’ll be leaving the form behind.
The death of the novel doesn’t mean the death of storytelling. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever going to put an Aristotelian structure of fiction into 120,000 words. On the contrary, it’s going to mean that storytelling will finally be unleashed. We’re going to see fiction strap on blue tights and a red cape and really soar.
Personally I think that’s going to be fun to see.
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An interesting side point: You don’t see many people whining over the (imminent) death of the CD. At least not in artistic terms. There are plenty of people bemoaning the economics of the music biz, but I haven’t heard anyone claim that the art itself is suffering for it. Why? Because music continues on. We recognize that what we enjoy about the music is the actual notes; all the other stuff (the liner notes, the cover art, the videos, the arrangement of songs in 10- to 12-song chunks) is extraneous.
I wonder how long musical artists will continue to produce 3- to 5-minute songs. The length of the typical rock song is no accident; it happens to correspond rather nicely with the amount of music a 45 RPM record will hold. When the 33 1/3 RPM record became the dominant force in popular music in the 1960s and artists were suddenly freed from the constraints of the 45 RPM record, you saw the birth of the so-called “concept album.” I suspect popular music is still around 3 to 5 minutes in length for two reasons: because broadband technologies still make it prohibitive to download anything much longer than that for a large number of consumers; and because musicians are still under the influence of commercial television and feature films. A five-minute song is the perfect length to play behind movie credits or in between commercial breaks.
So what would the “normal” length of a piece of music be, freed from any technological constraints? Keep in mind that we still have physiological restraints of memory and basic human restlessness to consider. I suspect, based on little more than gut instinct, that 12 to 15 minutes might be a more natural length of time for a piece of music.
Which leads to the question of how long the “normal” story will be, freed from any technological constraints. Hard to say, and I’m not really even willing to hazard a guess.